FicWad: fresh-picked original and fan fiction

As you may, possibly, have noticed, I've been completely ignoring FicWad for a while now, and some things have gone unfixed.

The biggest problem is that email-sending died a while ago, so no-one was getting signup emails or new passwords or whatnot. Turns out that this was because FicWad's hosting provider accidentally disabled the email account in question during some sort of maintenance. I've fixed that, and the backed up email queue is getting processed.

The problem with "everything is getting sent back out" is that there's a big backlog. If you signed up and then asked for a new password because you never got your password email... you'll get the signup email, and then (later) the actual working password.

I'm sorry about that. It may take a few days, but eventually everything will show up, and you'll be in possession of the correct account details.

I've added a very minimal editor to the story page -- just a few buttons to let you bold/italic/whatever bits of your story, and a preview panel.

If anyone has any problems with this, let me know.

Sorry about last night's downtime (all those "died while connecting to database" messages). Our hosting provider did a data center move, and I didn't pay enough attention to their email telling me about it.

I made sure the webserver wasn't on the list, but the database server? Shame on me.

"What are email notifications?"

They've actually been enabled for about two hours now, during which time I noticed that it was kind of spammy without an editing delay for stories. So now the notifications won't go out for a few minutes after you update the story, giving you time to find and fix that one comma.

The very valid complaints about rating being somewhat broken have been resolved, I do believe.

I've refilled everyone's rating points. Go forth, my subjects, and tell stories what you think of them!

Rating points had been not refilling, and I had been at a loss to work out why.

Turns out my eyes were skimming over a typo all along. (".sh" instead of ".py" -- who knew?)

DreamHost is having what they describe as major networking issues -- if you find access to FicWad to be intermittent, that's why.

(Sorry.)

Two things:

1. Feeds are back. Currently we have all recent stories, all recent stories in a particular category, and all recent stories by a particular author. ATOM is the format. Once per hour is the maximum update frequency. (I happen to like Google Reader myself for this stuff.)

2. Cache clears triggered by the site being edited are no longer performed immediately; they're now deferred until a few minutes later. It turned out that immediate clearing scaled really badly, causing a lot of delays.

The rating pages should no longer be horribly squished in IE6.

(I would like to point out that I don't care if things look worse in IE6, so long as they're still functional. I have no intention of spending the amount of effort it would take to get IE6 pixel-perfect when it's already outdated. This stance is possibly slightly callous, I admit.)

One issue that has become apparent since updating the site is that operations which have to clear a class of pages from the cache are quite slow. This wasn't noticeable until the cache got reasonably full, unfortunately. The likely consequence of this is that I'm going to shunt a few things into scripts that run every five-to-fifteen minutes instead of forcing you to wait while they update whenever you upload a story.

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge that there are still some stories out there that got mangled by The Great Unicode Switch. I'm likely going to be waiting until a low-traffic moment (say, 4am on a Monday) and taking the site down for fifteen minutes so I can run a batch fixing script without potentially conflicting with anything.

I've been running around trying to patch up the sort of problems that you don't notice on your own, but which suddenly jump out when thousands of people are using the site.

(No kidding. When I put things live I was fairly confident that nothing was broken. Oh, how I learned.)

So, I have fixed:

1. Stories being cut off. I think. All the test-cases that people sent me work now, anyway. If you're still seeing stories that you post get cut off, email me a copy of the story (admin@ficwad,com) so I can track down the problem.

2. Character selecting in IE. Previously if there were no characters in a category it wouldn't let you post the story if you'd clicked in the select box, because IE doesn't recognize the 'disabled' attribute on an option.

3. Category selecting in IE. (Theme? Maybe.) Selecting a new category wasn't updating the character list. This was a complicated problem involving difficulties that prototype.js has with window load events. So I've switched javascript frameworks, incidentally cutting the amount of javascript you have to load by about 80%.

3. I re-enabled the story views counter for authors. Your stats will update once a day in the (American) morning.

In short, Unicode is nice. Unicode + PHP... tricky.